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The Google Wave API Hackathon in Mountain View is off to a good start with over 150 people from places as faraway as New Zealand and the Netherlands coding at the Googleplex.

(Photo credit: James D. Peterson)

Over the last seven weeks we've seen some early examples of how developers have used the Google Wave APIs, some of which are posted on the Google Wave Samples Gallery. The projects listed in the samples gallery also include source code, so they can serve as a good reference for you. To highlight a few, there's:

Groupy-the-bot: A robot, written in Python, that enables users to create groups and manage their own subscriptions.

Floodit Game: A competitive gadget game where users take turns capturing as many squares as possible.

Waves in WordPress: A neat use of the embed API that makes it easy to put waves in a post or page on WordPress.

On the Google Wave team, we've also been hard at work improving the sandbox's stability and performance, as well as enhancing the APIs available: the UI and speed of gadget rendering, enabling cleaner gadget --> robot communication, and we've open sourced the Robots Java API.
For those developers out there looking to get started, as we blogged last week, we’ve already rolled out roughly 6,000 developer accounts and we’re working through an additional 20,000 requests over the course of the next month. If you haven't done so already, you’re welcome to request a sandbox account.
In other news: this morning we announced that we plan to start extending the Google Wave preview beyond developers on September 30th. This will take place on wave.google.com rather than the separate "sandbox" instance we are currently using, and we plan to involve about 100,000 users. In addition to the developers already using Wave, we will invite groups of users from the hundreds of thousands who offered to help report bugs when they signed up on wave.google.com.
Leading up to that rollout, we’re focusing on improving the speed, stability and usability of Google Wave. This includes of course addressing many of the issues highlighted by the developers in the sandbox thus far (thanks for your feedback!). We're also continuing to expand the Google Wave APIs, and we'd love your feedback on the forum. As we have mentioned in the past, our goal is that extensions built by third parties feel fully on-par with Google Wave's native features to users. We know we have some way to go and really appreciate your help in getting there.
Stay tuned for more updates from tomorrow's Google Wave Federation Day.
Posted by Dan Peterson, Product Manager, Google Wave